Media Advisory

TO                         Assignment Editors; Business, Science and Education Reporters

FROM                     College of Science, Engineering and Mathematics

SUBJECT                Murdock Charitable Trust Provides Major Grant to UAF Trustee Meets with Recipients in Fairbanks

LOCATION              Water and Environmental Research Center, 241A Duckering Building, UAF Campus

DATE & TIME          Monday, May 4; 11:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.

Executive Director Neal Thorpe and Senior Program Officer John Van Zytveld with the Murdock Charitable Trust, a private foundation which has provided more than $300,000 to UAF for education and scientific research programs this year, will be in Fairbanks Monday, May 4. The two will tour UAF's Water and Environmental Research Center, which recently obtained over a quarter-million dollars worth of laboratory equipment from the Murdock Charitable Trust to enhance student education in the environmental sciences, including remediation studies of oil-contaminated soils and contaminated groundwater sites.

The two will also be meeting with recipients of Partners in Science grants, another Murdock Trust initiative, which provides research opportunities for high school teachers. Lathrop High School teacher David Dershin is one of three Fairbanks area partners grant recipients. He will join UAF associate professor of electrical engineering Joe Hawkins this summer to study how pollution gets into the upper atmosphere and travels around the globe. Dershin and Hawkins will work with the Alaska Student Rocket Program to design a research payload to launch from Poker Flat during the summer of 1999. Dershin will apply his experiences in the classroom when he returns to teaching at Lathrop next fall.

CONTACT: UAF Public Information Officer Debra Damron (907) 474-7122 or Murdock Charitable Trust Program Officer John Van Zytveld, (360) 694-8415.

DPD/4-29-98/98-058ma